Sunday, October 12, 2008

Ramblings, Rants & Remedies: MS homeschoolers and vaccination in the news

Ramblings, Rants & Remedies: MS homeschoolers and vaccination in the news

I got an award




Life on thePlanet thinks I am worthy of the Brillante Weblog Award 2008, muchas gracias. And my apologies for taking so long to post it.

Now to pass it on.

Stop harassing homeschoolers about vaccinations

Chris Joyner claims homeschoolers are avoiding vaccinations. Read The Clarion Ledger's Some Miss. parents home-schooling kids to avoid vaccinations.

Some public health officials are concerned the growing popularity of home schooling has created gaps in the vaccination safety net, leading to outbreaks of rare childhood diseases

First off many homeschoolers do vaccinate their children to imply that all homeschoolers do not vaccinate their children is misleading and unfair. The reporter also ignores the fact that most parents make the decision to vaccinate before the child reaches school age (see vaccination schedule). The decision to homeschool may be driven by the parents desire not to expose their children to what they see as risky vaccines. But homeschooling isn't to blame for children being unvaccinated.

All states allow unvaccinated children to attend school with a medical doctor's excuse. Mississippi and West Virginia alone allow no exemptions beyond medical necessity, leaving parents with home-schooling as the only option if they do not want to have their children vaccinated.

So public school students with a medical doctor's excuse do not have to be vaccinated, but the reporter focus only on unvaccinated homeschoolers in his article. Also no mention is made of students enrolled in private schools, are they required to vaccinate or is it left up to the parents and the private school officials?

Like many states, Mississippi does not require parents to register their children if they intend to home school. Ann Zeise, an independent researcher who runs a home-schooling Web site, used Census data to project an estimate of the number of home-schoolers for each state. Her estimate for Mississippi is more than 14,000 students.

Shoddy reporting here MS law requires homeschoolers to register with the school attendance officer for their school district.

Caplan does little to calm the fears of parents who home school their children to prevent government-mandated vaccines. He said states should require home-schooled children to be vaccinated and make it tougher to get an exemption.

Really in light of this I think the decision to vaccinate should be left up to the parents.
After years of insisting there is no evidence to link vaccines with the onset of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), the US government has quietly conceded a vaccine-autism case in the Court of Federal Claims.
Government Concedes Vaccine-Autism Case in Federal Court - Now What?

If the Federal Government can not prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the vaccines are SAFE for all children then no one should be forced to have their children vaccinated.